Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/304

 The growing difference between father and son had one advantage for Frank, if we can call it an advantage, viz., that Frank was pretty well overlooked by both of them, and being left to himself might draw profit from this freedom. That is to say he might so far profit himself, that he need not be a witness of all that took place in the farm, might wander at will through the fields, might go to the cemetery for Staza, and lead her wherever he chose.

We are not among those who think that home is always the best place for children. On the contrary, it is frequently the greatest blessing for a child if he be freed from the fetters of home and be left to mother nature and her relation chance, that they may develop what home cannot impart, and what, indeed, it often thoroughly perverts.

These children, at all events, found together away from home what at home they had lacked. Nature and chance lovingly made good to them the deficiencies of home life. We mean by nature the apparition of the heavens, and we mean by chance heaven’s divine providence, and we have two instructors with which few homes can be compared.

Staza took him with her to the cemetery, and there they beheld face to face the serious side of life. Frank took Staza into the fields and to the open wold, and they recognised the smiles of the green turf on the earth, the azure blue of the firmament of